One of the smallest things that can go wrong with your website can damage it the most. Link rot – dead hyperlinks – are just as nasty as the name suggests. When you leave your website unattended, the inevitable happens. References to other websites become invalid. You move or delete pages. Someone changes the name of a file, and any links there break.

It’s easy to see how link rot happens, but you might be surprised to learn how adversely it can affect your site. When website visitors encounter a dead link, the overwhelming tendency is to leave the site altogether. Granted, a dead link on a deep internal page is less detrimental than one on your homepage, but still. One false click, and you’ve lost a potential doner, volunteer, customer or fan.

Luckily, there are some common-sense precautions you can take to minimize this risk.

Run link reports.

If you have an analytics program (which you should – read what we’ve written about analytics) that you’re consulting regularly, you’ll see a report of dead links visitors are encountering. If you don’t have an analytics program, you can at least run your website through a link checker. How? Type “link checker” into Google, and you’ll be spoiled with free choices.

Enable automatic aliases.

Those who use our Drupal websites hardly notice when they’ve changed a link. We enable automatic aliases so that whenever a page name changes, any old links that lead there change too. Look for this feature in your own content management system. You can also create redirects that reroute old links to new pages.

Provide informative 404 pages.

You’ve seen pages with the 404 File Not Found page. If you can’t catch every dead link on your site, at least create a custom 404 page. List potential reasons the link may be dead, and help direct the user to find the page they’re seeking, such as by using a search box.

Avoid URL shorteners.  

These services that take your lengthy URL and transfer it into something shorter that looks like http://bit.ly or http://ow.ly are killer for links. They change over time and get reassigned to other users. Only think of them as a short-term fix, not a long-term solution for your website.

[Photo credit: Death Becomes Her by 19melissa68, on Flickr]

[This article is part of a 4-part series on cleaning up your website. Check out the other articles on freshening up your design, copy and links.]

[Image: Flickr user bies]

At home, the flower beds are clean, the trees are pruned and the windows are sparklingly clear. I, probably like most of you, have been doing spring cleaning, and working my way down a list of home maintenance and improvement tasks. It’s satisfying to check those items off and look at the polished result.

At work, I’m also doing spring cleaning, and I hope some of you are too. I like to take some time every six months or so (call the second session fall clean-up) to tidy up some of the messiness that has worked its way into our website over the winter months. It’s also a good time to stand back and make some critical decisions about the functionality of your website and evaluate the direction you’re headed. Websites should never sit stagnant, and putting some time on the calendar at least twice a year to evaluate your strategy should be a given.

This week, we’ll guide you through a clean-up and revitalizing process that you can follow on your own website. Today we’ve got three things you can do to prep for your week of good housekeeping.

Put together a clean team. You’re about to do a major clean-up and make some big decisions. It’s not something one person should do alone, so put together a task force. If you are an army of one, just make sure to pace yourself. Here’s a good model for putting together a team:

• You should have someone at a high level who can either make these decisions or who has the power to put them on the schedule for evaluation.
• Also appoint someone to act as project manager. The person to put together a schedule, arrange meeting times and generally make sure everyone is moving along.
• Finally, have one or more people to do the busy work: someone to update copy, remove dead links, make little changes. Volunteers can be a big help here.

Dedicate half an hour every day. Consistency is the key to spring cleaning – not killing yourself with work. Just set aside half an hour or an hour every day for a week to evaluate what needs to be done. Your task may take longer than half an hour, but you’ll be able to budget how much time you’ll need to do it in half an hour.

Set up a place to submit comments/ideas. While you’re cleaning up the website you have, you’re going to have ideas about the website you wish you had. Establish a place for you and your team to submit ideas or discoveries so you can decide if you want to add new functionality to your website. Check out this earlier post Make a Better Website with a User Survey for ideas of how to collect ideas and responses.

Good luck setting up today. Tune in tomorrow for the next step in your polished-up website, and click here to see all stories about spring cleaning.

Good website navigation is so intuitive you never even think about it. Bad navigation you certainly notice, because it makes you work hard to get where you want to go. The trouble is, intuitive design takes careful thought. You’ve really got to predict your site’s visitors’ movements, and be ready for any effort they’ll make.

Not all website designers do, of course. Many – quite innocently, I must add – think not a bit about how people use websites. They don’t read reports, they don’t think critically about what confuses them whey they visit sites or they get a little too creative in their efforts.

I’ll be addressing usability in an upcoming e-seminar (there’s still time to register if you hurry – click here to do so) , but I wanted to share some common mistakes, in no particular order, in case you feel like frustrating your site visitors and driving traffic away:

1. Use inconsistent navigation. Vary it from page to page. Sometimes put it on the top, sometimes put it on the side, and forget to add menu items here and there.
2. Get cutesy with navigation. Rather than saying “Home,” “About Us” and “Services,” say “The Homestead,” “Meet the Gang” and “What Makes Us Tick.” It also helps if your audience is mostly English-speaking and you write your navigation in a foreign language with foreign characters – like Hebrew (you know who you are …).
3. Don’t add a home link and assume everyone knows to click your logo to go back to the homepage.
4. Put your navigation links in alphabetical order or order or length – anything but order of importance.
5. Make pages open in new windows, thereby risking pop-up blocking software won’t allow that page to open and disabling your site visitor’s back button.
6. Forget sub-navigation – put every single link on every single page.
7. Put navigation at the bottom of the page or somewhere else “below the fold.”
8. Give users multiple choices to perform one action. For instance, if you’re selling something, list three different places they can buy it.
9. Use too many menus. At least three. In different places. With redundant choices.
10. Don’t even use navigation – just put some links around the page.